Drawing on my experience in popular music and dance, I here work with the music video format to explore its particular performativity.

Untitled: Portraits (2017) are together studies which draw inspiration partly from Warhol’s Screen Tests, with the thought that if he were alive today he would be engaging with the music video as a format at the centre of pop culture. With these works I am interested in iconoclasm, a critical engagement with technique and the formal properties of popular media. Whilst drawing on certain familiar values of the music video (in terms of rhythm, editing, length and addressal of audience) I intend to re-focus on performance within the medium. The videos are played without the sound so that the subject, the body and its gestures, becomes more present; the identity of the music is present only through its embodiment. By masking the gender of the singer and the placing of the (white mid-30s) male body in relation to the music and its performance, I aim to highlight the codes of gender and performance of sexualities.

Each video is around 3 minutes 30 seconds, and you can find a short-form version here